Trump, New York Times meeting back on
Updated 9:50 a.m.: President-elect Donald Trump may be visiting with the New York Times after all.
Spokesman Hope Hicks told reporters gathered in Trump Tower on Tuesday morning that Trump was “going to the New York Times” later in the day.
The meeting is to consist of a private meeting with the publisher followed by an on-the-record session with Times journalists.
The statement comes only hours after Trump tweeted that he would not be meeting with the newspaper.
He wrote on twitter that he canceled the meeting “with the failing @nytimes when the terms and conditions of the meeting were changed at the last moment. Not Nice.”
Trump cancels meeting with New York Times
Updated 8:30 a.m.: President-elect Donald Trump has abruptly canceled a meeting with The New York Times. He accused the organization of changing the conditions for the session “at the last moment.” The newspaper denied the charge and said Trump’s aides tried to change the rules.
He’d been scheduled to meet Times reporters, editors and columnists and did not give details of his complaint, saying in a morning tweet only that “the terms and conditions of the meeting were changed at the last moment. Not nice.”
Eileen M. Murphy, the newspaper’s senior vice president for communications, said the paper “did not change the ground rules at all.”
She said Trump’s aides asked for a private meeting only, with nothing on the record, after having agreed to a meeting that would consist of a small off-the-record session and a larger on-the-record one with reporters and columnists.
Trump denies conflicts of interest
Updated Monday 9:30 p.m.: President-elect Donald Trump is appearing to deny that he is using the powers of his future office to benefit his businesses worldwide.
Trump took to Twitter Monday night to say it was “well-known” that he has properties across the globe. He blamed the media for raising questions about them.
He has said repeatedly that he will leave his company to his children and have no interest in it — but three of his adult children are also playing key roles in his transition.
Trump also tweeted that he believes Nigel Farage, leader of the “Leave” movement that propelled the United Kingdom to quit the European Union, would do “a great job” as Great Britain’s ambassador to the United States.
Farage supported Trump’s campaign and visited the president-elect this week.
Trump meets the TV-news crowd in private
Updated Monday 8:19 p.m.: President-elect Donald Trump met Monday with television news executives and some well-known TV journalists and repeatedly told them the campaign reporting about him was “unfair” and “dishonest.”
Participants in the meeting at Trump Tower in New York described it as a contentious but generally respectful gathering.
But if the media elite attended in hopes of improving relations with the forthcoming Trump administration, that wasn’t quite in the cards. The president-elect specifically called out reporting by CNN and NBC that he deemed unfair, according to four people who attended the meeting, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was off the record. (The ground rules prevented the networks from reporting the very story they were part of.)
The group included some of the top news media figures that Trump had aimed barbs at during the campaign, including “Meet the Press” anchor Chuck Todd; ABC News anchors George Stephanopoulos and David Muir; CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Erin Burnett; ABC correspondent Martha Raddatz; “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt; and a CBS News contingent that included Norah O’Donnell, Charlie Rose, John Dickerson and Gayle King.
Among the network news executives present were CNN Worldwide Chairman Jeff Zucker and the presidents of the news divisions at NBC, MSNBC, ABC and Fox.
Trump was joined by his newly appointed chief White House strategist, Stephen Bannon, his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a top adviser.
Trump has scheduled two meetings with the publisher and journalists from The New York Times on Tuesday.
Instead of striking a harmonious tone to build rapport following the election, Trump was combative, participants said. In a calm and deliberate voice, he told the group sitting around a conference table that they had failed to provide their viewers with fair and accurate coverage, and told them they failed to understand him or his appeal to millions of Americans.
But he made no mention of the enormous amount of airtime that the networks, especially on cable, devoted to his campaign. A number of analyses have noted that Trump’s presidential effort was boosted by the news media’s fascination with him.
Trump directed particular ire at CNN and several reporters at other cable networks whom he sees as unreasonably antagonistic toward him, though he did not mention them by name. He also referenced both NBC News reporter Katy Tur and ABC’s Raddatz without using their names.
Trump shrugged off the need for a constant pool covering him, the people said, though he did not delve into specifics. He has repeatedly shirked his pool, upending a long-standing tradition of the president and president-elect.
— Paul Farhi, The Washington Post
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